Why You Might Want to Do SEO on Someone Else's Site - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

OK, we know what you're all saying. You're saying, "But…why would I want to help someone else rank for my brand?" Stick with us, though. You can leverage the strength and authority of other sites to help increase the authority of your own site.

This week, Rand discusses this theory and shares a few reasons why (along with examples of how) you should work SEO on someone else's page to help yourself.

Have you tried this tactic before? How did it work out? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to this special Thanksgiving edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can see, today I'm dressed in my fancy pants clothing. Today is actually the What the Fancy Wednesday at SEOmoz. It's the first time we're ever doing it. Joel, who's behind the camera, I know you can't see him, look really hard. If you turn around behind you, that's where he is. He's also wearing a tie. Lots of people at the Moz offices are dressed lovely. But it's eclectic lovely, which is why I'm wearing a green sport coat and a pink tie and all that kind of stuff. All right. And the beard is back, thank goodness. It was rough going without it for a couple weeks there. Whoo, that was hard times.

This week on Whiteboard Friday I wanted to talk a little bit about why you might want to do SEO on somebody else's site. This might seem a little bit strange, because in SEO we learn very early on that putting all of your content on one domain, putting all of your links to that domain, doing all of your SEO work on a single domain is much, much better than spreading out your efforts, not just from an effort and protocol perspective, but also from a rankings perspective, because of domain authority, because of how domains and an individual sub-domain inherits domain authority and link metrics and all these kinds of tings,

But weirdly enough there are some cases when it might make great sense to do SEO on somebody else's site. Now the classic example that you'll always hear is reputation management., meaning I want to control the search results for my brand name or my brand names because I don't want anybody else getting in there or saying something bad about me or having the ability to draw away my traffic.

But actually there are some other big ones. Let's start with number one. I like to say don't just reputation manage, meaning don't just control the fact that there's no bad stuff on there. If there are great things that are being written about you or your company or your brand or your product, make sure they rank well.

For example, imagine I have opened Rand's Fancy Pants Shop. It's quite possible. Who knows, maybe the career here at Moz won't work out. I've got Rand's Fancy Pants on Twitter, my Facebook page, and that kind of stuff. But what if The Seattle Weekly or the Stranger or The Seattle Times wrote an article calling Rand's Fancy Pants the best men's shop in the city? It might not rank very well normally, naturally because they probably aren't doing a great job at SEO. But me getting that independent press piece to rank highly for my brand name will probably actually improve my conversion rate and make more people want to come site and buy from me and come to my shop and all these kinds of things.

If you have positive press out there or if you're going to start generating some and get it to rank well for your brand name, that's even better than reputation management. That's reputation improvement.

Number two, you can leverage the domain authority of other websites. Now, I don't just mean this from the perspective to help put links back to you. I mean there might be search results where you say to yourself, "Boy, you know what? These keywords are just too darn competitive. I'm too early stage. My site doesn't have that much authority. It's going to be hard." A lot of times it's hard to get people to link to your site, but it can be much easier when you're independently requesting links or pointing links to a third party site that happens to have some interesting content that you might have controlled or uploaded or those kinds of things.

So there are great places to do this. If you're throwing an event and you happen to use good branding for the keywords you want to target for that event, places like Eventbrite can be amazing. For pages that you might want to control around specific campaigns or specific products, you could have a specific Twitter or Facebook page that you have that is earning all of those social signals as well as the rankings. Remember Twitter, in particular, Google just loves to rank Twitter pages for brand names.

SlideShare, putting content on SlideShare, you can control everything about that page, the text content that's on there, that's the content from the slide. The comments you get to control. You control the URL and the title. So you've got a lot of control on SlideShare, and if you can make that SlideShare do well, perform well, it will go to the front page of SlideShare, which means it gets a lot of links and attention and awareness from SlideShare internally that can help boost it up. I've seen SlideShare URLs ranking for all sorts of highly competitive phrases.

Google+, I've noticed that a lot of Google+ threads, individual threads that are public rank quite well and they're improving and improving as Google+ gets more and more domain authority of its own. What this means for you is use that title element on a Google+ thread. If you start some text and you surround it with the asterisk or star character, that will become bolded. That becomes kind of the title of the post. Then you can have URLs that you put in there. You can upload images there. You can put video and share video inside of Google+. All those opportunities.

YouTube same thing. Quora same story. You can start conversation threads, questions. Individual responses to questions get their own URL. Forum threads at forums you might find and guest posts. I particularly wanted to call out guest posts because guest posts is a great opportunity where you see that there might be someone who's ranking particularly well in your niche, has a lot of domain authority, has a popular blog, and rather than trying to get a link, which is what a lot of guest posts expect, you can say, "I don't want a link. I just want to write a great post for you."

Your real goal is to have that post rank, to have that post rank well and be associated with your name and your brand name. You're not even going after a link. When you're not, you seem less selfish and sort of have much more opportunity to do these kinds of things. Obviously, you're going to have to write a great post if you want it to rank well.

Number three, this one is a little bit of a chain effect, and this is kind of an old school SEO tactic, but something that still works. It actually started out in the spam world, where essentially black hat spammers would have a legitimate page that was linking to them and they'd point a bunch of crappy, low quality links to the page linking to them, rather than to their own site, essentially bolstering up the strength of the page that was linking over so that if those links got banned or penalized, it wouldn't impact their site. It would only impact the site linking to them.

This is sort of keep things that might harm you one step away from yourself. But this actually works very well in the totally white hat SEO world as well. If you've got a great link from a source, and especially if Google's not crawling it or they haven't crawled it yet or that link doesn't appear to have had much impact, you might want to point some links at it to help that page gain some extra authority, particularly if it's on a powerful domain, but you're feeling like, man, it's just not getting the credit, what I would normally expect it to provide to me, you can pump that page up.

I've got an article that The New York Times wrote years ago literally about facial hair trimming styles or something, and I had done a blog post about this years ago. They link over to SEOmoz. But it wasn't particularly valuable. So over the years, every once in a while I'll throw out, "Oh yeah, I was mentioned in The New York Times once here. It was kind of a weird article." But that's actually improved the value of that link coming from the NYT coming back over to SEOmoz.

Then fourth and finally, you can control bigger portions of SERP real estate. If there's a ranking that you particularly say, "Man, I'm ranking number two, number three, or I'm ranking number one and I'm getting great traffic. This is highly converting traffic. People come back again and again. They subscribe. This is wonderful traffic. I wish I could get more people from this."

This leveraging some other domains, leveraging SEO on other people's sites that reference or point to you can be a great way to kind of own more of the search engine real estate that shows up, and this can be done not just with standard search results, but think about videos, think about articles that include rel=author, any type of rich results that they're mixing in there, not just rich snippets, but vertical types of results. So location style results or news style results, you can enhance the rankability of other pages on other people's sites that reference you in order to control more of the real estate for a key phrase or term.

All right everyone. This is going to be wonderful. You're all going to go out. I hope you had a great turkey day, by the way. I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving for our friends here in the States, and for those of you overseas, we love to give thanks around this holiday in the U.S. and hopefully you have a lot to be thankful for as well. Of course, now you can go and link build to lots of other people and optimize other people's websites, and they'll be very thankful for that of course too.

All right everyone. Take care. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."

I do this all the time. I know many people who own little websites. It's real relationships in my town I use for this. My strategy is improving their rankings for free, (not difficult because it's only "KW town" to push), and, in exchange, just asking for a custom partner page. So, by helping him or her, I make myself ranking and everybody's happy.Promoting your own guest posts and relevant social profiles is great too !

Thats a nice way to build backlinks to your website. Promoting your social profiles and relevant guest posts or press, have fantastic results. I did it on a local client site and his customers was amazed. His clients was thinking that his business is so great so Google decide to full the first page of results related to his business. And that give him a kind of credibility in the eyes of his clients. Most people get amazed when they see that you rank for 2-3 results on first page.

Thanks for this Rand. I must say, what you said about linking to articles other people have written about you is a great Idea. I write personal blog, as well as work related ones. A few years ago the local city newspaper wrote an article about some community work I did.(Link)http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/Let-s-unite-clean-dirty-old-town/story-12492933-detail/story.html and that article can only be good for reputation building. So, when I get home from work tonight, I'll be adding some links to the article for sure. I'll remember to use this technique for my clients more too.Another insightful Whiteboard Friday. Much appreciated.

I would have to agree with you and say that this is a pretty darn good idea. This is something that you should definitely let your clients know whenever you get the chance. Your customers will appreciate it and will help you rank to the top as well. Staying friendly, being helpful can definitely go a long ways if you do this correctly.

That was beautiful. I think it's a very interesting concept. Although I would question, should this strategy be industry related, e.g. SEO company A writes a beautiful post for SEO company B and doesn't ask for a link-back, or cross industry?I would think that industry related might complicate the flow of branding, while cross industry might not be viable in general, at least. Or did I miss the point?

I used this tactic before to rank a Consumer Reports article that linked to my company's website as a recommended resource for the reviewed products. It worked like a charm, and wound up driving tons of traffic that converted around 9% compared to the website average rate of 1.5%People read the unbiased article, which featured our store as the best resource, and couldn't help but convert to sales.

Excellent WBF. I loved #1--simple, but genius. A positive review about your company being visible in the SERPs with your company ranking 3 or 4 seems like it could give you a higher conversion rate than your site alone at #1.

Hi Rand
nice to see you in White Board Friday. First i like to thank you for assuring
me that i am going right way. I have a SEO site which design and looks is not
promising. And i think promoting scope of that site is little less. So i
started SEO in other domain exactly you mentioned. Recently my site is ranking
high. I follow many SEO tricks so i was not sure that SEO in others site is
actually benefiting me or not. But your post confirmed that those sites gave a
boost to my site. I have made business profile in many business site, made
video and submitted in popular video site, made powerpoint presentations, info
graph. I was not rested after doing those i was regularly promoting them. Especially
i was doing social media for those. Frankly speaking i have lack of content in
site and i am not getting time to write for my blog these days. So i have to
depend in these techniques to promote my site. From now i will concentrate more
on doing SEO in others site. Oh, late happy thanks giving day.

The explanation you are giving to this concept is actually so logical. This could really help me explain to my costumers why to do some good stuff so people will link to them and in that way i can help those inbound links to improve even more.

Just write a articles for another niche blog site then put two different links, one is your backlinks and other is authority site links such as edu or gov link which is not related to your niche. Then blog moderator will think its natural for my blog. Rand saying do not building your link, just gain links from another website.Link pyramid via guest post will kill your time. It will take lots of time to build a link pyramid via guest post. Only experienced people can do that.

Rand your article is really awesome and yes i agree with you if someone is site not fitted on seo parameters then why will do seo for that. suppose if we will work on that it will take never picked up.we have only two options we will modified the site ya we will create new website for seo. which is well fitted on all seo parameters.

Hi Rand Fishkin! First of all thanks for sharing such an amazing piece of information regarding SEO strategies and I never thought in this way of achieving benefit from a third party source. I always focus on my own domain but now I better understand how I can take advantage from other sources.

Interesting thought... 'doing SEO on other websites'. I
have been creating and optimizing social network profiles for clients,
like many SEO do, but this plan takes it a step further and develops
content on other networks! Thanks for sharing!

I always do this with my guest articles - linking to them (from niche forums, other guest articles and from my own blog posts if possible). After-all, the better the PR of your guest article is, the better it would be for your own linked website! Great post Fishkin :)

I also tend to learn something seoing for other webmasters as fun little side projects. A few times I've stumbled upon neat ideas or a good link resource I can use for my own sites that I discovered while trying to help someone else. Often times, it leads to bigger and better things.

This strategy is not new i guess or maybe i've been using it just because of my instinct. To summarize your post is to find some time to SEO the pages where your a backlink or co-citation to your website exists. Not necessarily the cheapos (directories or blog comments) links but one can see if washingtonpost or prweb has published a great story on a particular brand. One can even use guest posts to promote yourself. This could be an efficient mean to improve your social circle with bloggers as well.

This is an area we have had some great success with and often, with smaller businesses that have new sites and lofty goals or budgets that don't line up with what they want to achieve. Just by find out where their customers or prospects are hanging out and getting involved there they can generate a lot of exposure in search and a lot of well qualified leads.

Another way we have used this approach is where we have a new site, they are doing content marketing but unsurprisingly, the links are not really tumbling in yet. So, by creating a very strong answer to a common question and using then going to the sites that are ranking and people are asking this question we can get involved, provide a light answer and often drop a link back to the blog post for an expanded version of that question.

This way we may end up with lots of pages on external sites that rank well that then steer traffic towards our blog posts. These may not be traditional SEO - move the dial type links but they do send lots of highly qualified visitors and in some cases, this approach alone has been enough to sustain some of our smaller clients without them having to dig in and chase their tail trying to rank for big keywords. Additionally, if you have great content, but the links are not coming in, this is another way to get more eyes on your content, to manually steer people towards the content and help generate those natural links (especially if you have something on the site that is easy for people to share or link to).

Another way we have used this style of approach is where we will guest post on a much more established site with a link back to the client site. We will then work on promoting this post via many means (as above or more traditional relationship based outreach) as it is much easier to find people who have linked to that established site and will link again so we create a post that links to us on an established site that then has lots of links & shares to the page itself and a really juicy link back to the site we are promoting.

Though, never got any positive review yet but if got definitely will try your tactic to improve the rankings in the serp. This post would be useful to Larry Kim of Wordtracker who got link from Wall Street Journal. I searched on G with different keywords to find his post but didn't got any. I hope he must be getting many conversions & huge traffic from that single post on WSJ.

One of the things that I did quite a while
back is to optimize the SEOmoz profile again my brand name and now its ranking no.
4 or no. 5 for my brand name! What happen is when any of my clients who is
interested in working with me see me that I am that active on SEOmoz community
and his level of trust on me increased to a greater extent...

This helps me with 2 things...

1.
I don’t have to put too much
effort if I have to grab the client.

2.
I usually charge my money
instead of what they want to pay me for my services.

Worked out for me good as well. As soon someone (high authority) site 'talked' or '/linked' to me i started SEO for the page they linked from.Boosted their, but also my page :).Great WBF thanks.ps: great outfit hehe

Yup! Yup! Yup I do and practise this like it was a religion to me. I find that if we can really help our partners with their SEO then the traffic and the quality of traffic back to our primary site is fantastic.One such exercise was a new Japanese partner of ours, great company very professional but SEO is not something at the forefront of their mind - and to be honest our ability to speak Japanese sucks!I recommend if possible creating content on your partner sites and linking to them and in return help them with their SEO to make sure content is geared towards what fits with your brand and services but with a localised twist.

Interesting. As a hobby blogger in a very geeky subculture (steampunk), what you are suggesting happens all the time there. I post for other sites, they do stuff for me. Obviously, there is no money involved at all. Which begs the question: Does altruism decrease with the monetary value of the topic? I guess it does, and that's why people need tzo be reminded that doing altruistic (well, more or less altruistic) stuff in their industry every now and then is a good thing.Great WBF and I love the tie!

An interesting post Mr Rand, hats off to you and the SEOmoz team for researching this kind of data! We really enjoyed this over at Tidy Design, truth be told it was not what we expected, I mean come on, investing all that time and energy into optimising sites out of your control!! Ok, it shouldn't make sense but it does!... Cheers for planting that seed Mr Rand, wishing all a great weekend across the pond :D

As usual a great video. I might send that over to my clients to upsell them :) Some of them REALLY need help with their reputation management and third party sites like twitter and facebook but don't let us help because they "think" they can manage.

This is a win/win situation. It really is a great thing to be able to help another site do well and be rewarded for it in a totally organic way. We as SEO's focus so much on our own sites and pages many times we forget to just add value to the community. Any time you can add something of value without demanding something in return you can naturally increase your own reputation in the process.

Nice post Rand, "Who knows, maybe the career here at Moz won't work out" ??? LOL, i always believe that SEO is not equal to Google, when you could make a quality content for your site and useful for others, you had win the SEO heart and half way on making Search Engines loves your site.

Belated Happy Thanksgiving, Rand and Mozzers! Liking "What the Fancy Wednesday" at SEOmoz and look forward to some more "kits" - short for outfit for those non-cyclists.Guess doing some SEO for other sites can be thought of as "link it forward" instead of "pay it forward." What goes out does come back to you.Good tips with an unexpected approach to a WBF. Like!

Wonderful concept - taking the idea of Reputation Management to a higher plane - Reputation Improvement! Thanks so much for the strategic insight and tactical ideas to support the concept. I LOVE getting more real estate on SERPs for our clients - but haven't really done much beyond getting their web page and client-owned sites (SlideShare, YouTube, etc.) working in that equation. Which, frankly, was awesome enough - we see client's now how are in 3-4 of the top slots on Google with that strategy. You're expanded my thinking and helped me think of that as a white hat tactic that's a win for clients and searchers.

Hi Rand and Mozzers, Happy Thanksgiving! Please pardon my like of "spacing" in my post. For whatever reason Macs and SEOMoz don't necessarily play super well together. Rand, you are looking might spiffy and my son Joshua is very relieved that the beard is back.Interesting post. It did have me thinking a bit. I am wondering how practical it is though, you know? Most of us are busting hump just trying ti handle the SEO on our own sites, let alone take on a bunch of the sites that link to us. That being said, I have a dream of starting an SEO agency in Olympia, WA. What would you say would be the four pillars of a SEO agency start-up? In addition to a great SEO (me of course) what else do I need? Developer? Web designer? Social Media Manager? Just curious!Dana

Happy Thanksgiving, All! On the subject of leveraging the DA of other sites: I've also had great success with LinkedIn. If you answer some popular questions on LinkedIn Answers and participate in group discussions once in awhile, you can easily push your LI profile to the top of the SERPS for a brand query (your name).

At first I didnt know what to expect with the subject of this blog post. But after reading the complete blog post I am impressed. Thank you Rand for this great topic on White Board Friday. I have also had great success with LinkedIn and other great social media sites.

Well, this will give a huge benefit, to help others is always beneficial but i done this almost 6 months ago but the people are less interested in this, try to first focus on relation and then offer him or her your free optimization so as he/she will be interested. #myopinion